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In his recent article “Don’t Talk About Green” Richard Serreeni, discusses the idea that to sell “green” it should come down to the cost savings. This is an emerging trend that needs to be seriously discussed.

To better understand this a number of questions have to be asked? Is cost savings the main driver to adopt green practices or just a side benefit. Are companies driven by an urge to help the environment? How does helping the environment measure up to being able to lower their costs? What if adopting green practices will in the short term raise costs? Can this be justified to investors?

According to a survey of businesses at Storage Expo 2008, 70 percent of respondents said green IT and efficiency is a priority, as long as it saves money. This is a very telling statement. Basically 70 percent felt that the number one driver is to save money and helping the environment is just a side benefit.

Although this may sound like a negative trend and that the death of the trend to save enviorment being just a Bull market away, I don’t believe this is the case , in fact I think this is a healthy development. Obviously the cost savings “sell” is critical to a company, very few CFO’s will sign off an investment in Green technology or practices that won’t result in a cost savings and a justifiable ROI. However this will cause two critical things to happen. Firstly the green innovations that are emerging will need to develop technologies that are not just green friendly but will also be cost efficient and secondly in the end the environment will benefit as companies incorporate these cost efficient solutions. In my opinion the bottom line is getting from point A to point B (i.e lowering Energy usage) and the reason doesn’t matter as much. What do you think?